300-level / Intermediate Courses

Prerequisite:  none.

Description: This course will canvas some of the “origins” of the English novel and trace its development (particularly as anti-romance satire and realism) up to the mid-eighteenth century. Our readings and discussion will refer to the European context of the evolution of this narrative form in England. We will consider the novel as responding to a network of interrelated problems – of the self and its imaginative politics – at the representational crossroads of medieval epic, courtly romance, spiritual autobiography, picaresque satire, colonialist adventure, gallant intrigue, baroque casuistry, bourgeois conduct book, sentimental love story, moral treatise, psychological realism, and mock-heroic “comic epic in prose.” As the emerging literary “form of forms,” the early modern novel vibrantly juxtaposes and interweaves all these different generic strands. Our work together will aim at a critical analysis of the textual ideologies articulated in this experimental process of historical combination.

Texts: The required reading for this course will include most or all of the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in September 2017.)

Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (Oxford)
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (Oxford)
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Hackett)
Lazarillo de Tormes (Norton)
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (Norton)
Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves (Norton)
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (Norton)
Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (Broadview)
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Norton)
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Oxford)
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford)

Evaluation: Paper (50%), tests (40%), participation (10%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies).

Format: Lecture

Prerequisite:  none.

Description: A survey of 17th-century poetry and prose (excluding Milton). In England, the 17th century was a time of revolution: of social upheaval and Civil War, as well as radical changes in philosophy and science. The literature of this turbulent time also is marked by its vitality and its variety. In this course, we will read representative works by writers including Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Marvell, Cowley, Lanyer, Cavendish, Philips, Bacon, Burton, Browne, discussing aesthetic developments in the context of the events of the period.

Texts: The Broadview Anthology of 17^th Century Verse & Prose (available at McGill Bookstore)
Other supplementary materials will be posted on Mycourses.

Evaluation: Midterm (20%), 8-page term paper (40%), final exam (30%); participation (10%).

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite or co-requisite: ENGL 202. This course is open only to English majors in the literature stream.  This course is to be taken in the Fall semester of U1 or in the first Fall semester after the student’s selection of the Literature Major program.

Description: This course introduces students to the formal and stylistic elements of poetry and prose fiction, provides them with a shared vocabulary for recognizing and analyzing different literary forms, and develops their reading, writing, and critical discussion skills.

Although many critical methods can be applied to the works in this course, Poetics focuses on teaching students how to talk and write precisely about a wide range of formal and stylistic techniques in relation to literary meaning in poetry and prose fiction. All the critical methodologies you will learn in your other English courses will benefit from your knowledge of the material of ENGL 311. You will read some works in Poetics that are also required in other courses, such as ENGL 202 and 203, the Departmental Surveys of English Literature. In Poetics, we study such works not primarily in historical context, or as engagements with literary, cultural or social history, but for the techniques of literary art with which they communicate to and move us. The course instructors assume that students enrolled as English majors will already have some facility explaining what given works of literature mean; we instead focus on understanding how literature creates meaning. Discussions and assignments will therefore involve the memorization, identification, and application of concepts and terms essential to the study of literary techniques. The English Literature program requires that ENGL 311 be taken in U1 so that all Literature students will be well prepared for their other studies with a shared terminology and training in critical writing.

Texts: 

• Abrams, M.H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham.  A Glossary of Literary Terms.  10^th edn.  Thomson-Wadsworth, 2009.
• Bausch, Richard, and R.V. Cassill, eds.  The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  Shorter 7^th edn.  New York: Norton, 2006.
• Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, eds.  The Norton Anthology of Poetry.  Shorter 5^th edn.  New York: Norton, 2005.

Note: The following textbook will be assigned for purchase to certain students.  All students are encouraged to buy it, or to consult one of the copies on Course Reserves in the MacLennan Library.​

• Messenger, William E., et al., eds.  The Canadian Writer’s Handbook.  5^th edn.  Toronto: Oxford, 2010.

Evaluation: first essay, close reading, 4 pp., 10%; second essay, comparison of poems, 5 pp., 15%; third essay, on short story, secondary research required, 6-7 pp., 15%; mid-term exam, 10% (in class); formal final examin­ation common to all sections of Poetics, 30%; class attendance and participa­tion, 10%; willing and effective completion of occasional short assign­ments, such as pop quizzes, writing exercises, scansions, and recitations, including such assignments and discussion opportunities as may be posted on the course website, 10%. This evaluation is the same for all sections of Poetics.

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies. Or my permission of the instructor.

Description: The objective of our seminar is to examine a selection of nineteenth-century British plays in performance. While we shall be engaged in a close reading of these plays by means of various interpretative strategies, in doing so, we shall give detailed analytical attention to how they were originally performed, taking into consideration the “material conditions of performance.” Some of these include licensing regulations; actresses, actors, and acting styles; costuming practices; scenography;  approaches to the creation of the mise-en-scène; lighting practices; theatre architecture; demographics; the nature of audiences’ affective responses to productions; sociology; art history; music history and musicology; directors and directing styles (directors in this period were normally called “actor-managers” or “actress-managers” as they not only directed their productions but customarily played in their leading roles); technological developments; critics and criticism; the composition of audiences, considered in relation to the holy trinity of race, class, and gender (among other ‘categories’); international influences; plays and playwrights (and editing practices and genres); experiments in dramaturgy and theatricalization; the archive of the repertoire; studies of the novel; economics and class, particularly the fraught issue of what it cost to go to the theatre; and the impress of “foreign” influences on all of the subjects listed above. (Note that this is not an exhaustive list.) Information about these (and related) matters is contained within the set-text for the course, whose title is a lucid articulation of exactly what we shall be covering and doing: The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, c. 2012) and whose overall critical introduction, critical introductions to the plays, meticulous end-notes and iconographic material are indispensable.

A corollary objective is to read / imagine / conjure the plays in a doubled perspective: why, how, and to what ends they existed in their own time, partly as a function of how their audiences engaged in serving as their co-creators of ‘meaning’; and doing likewise for their existence in our own time, an objective which will be accomplished in part by a good deal of reading texts out-loud, in round-the-table fashion, or by means of each student taking on specific parts. [Acting experience is not required!]  We might also want to stage scenes from selected plays. Arts W-25, where the class meets, is an adaptable space.

We shall also be considering the ideological, geo-political, and historical contexts in which these plays were performed, and how the plays were not only in part a consequence of these contexts, shaped by them in various ways, but also how the plays themselves, particularly  in performance, but also in reading, intervened in the social order, often contributing to the discourses around key issues, such as empire and colonization, race, gender demarcations of identities and exercises in power, the “New Woman,” the Suffragette Movement, the intimate connections amongst race, class, and art in the fin de siècle, social classes and their malcontents, constructions of the Other, the efflorescence of ideas, prejudices, and movements in relation to pro- and anti-Semitism, global and multi-sited models of theatrical ethnography, the obsession with various types of degeneracy and the concomitant rise of the discipline of criminology, theatre and / as exercises in the carnivalesque, particularly in connection with the venerable traditions of British pantomime, and both explicit and covert understandings of what the vexed term “British” meant or could mean or should mean. (Think about the debates about “Brexit.” What goes around comes around.)

The plays will be chosen from a selection (many of them available in the Davis anthology)  of George Colman, the Younger’s The Africans; or, War, Love, and Duty, Col. Ralph Hamilton’s Elphi Bey; or, The Arab’s Faith, James Smith and R. B. Peake’s Trip to America, Dion Boucicault’s The Relief of Lucknow, T. W. Robertson’s Ours, B. C. Stephenson and Alfred Cellier’s Dorothy, J. M. Barrie’s Ibsen’s Ghost; or, Toole Up-to-Date, Paul Potter’s Trilby (along with reading George du Maurier’s novel, Trilby, on which the play was based),  Nina Syrett’s The Finding of Nancy, Leopold Lewis and Henry Irving’s The Bells, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest and Salome, Elizabeth Robins’ Votes For Women, and possibly a work by Gilbert and Sullivan, depending of which play The Savoy Society produces in Moyse Hall, a production we would see together.

Evaluation: Consistent and consequential participation in the ongoing intellectual and cultural life of the seminar: 15%; One seminar presentation on a play. This will lead to writing a distilled critical argument advanced in an 8-page (maximum) double-spaced essay. The presentation and the paper will be worth 35%; 16--page long (maximum) double-spaced major scholarly essay (choice of individually-negotiated essay topics): 50%.

Format: Lectures, long, medium, and mini; PPPs; led-discussions on salient issues; student presentations with the possibility of engaging in exercises in Praxis.

Average enrollment: 22 students 

Expected Preparation: Previous university courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies.

Description: This course will offer a selective survey of drama and theatre in Quebec from the 1950s to the present. With a focus on French-language theatre (to be read in English translation), we will trace the changing aesthetics and politics of this dynamic tradition, being careful to read them in light of the shifting performance and social contexts. A secondary focus will be minority-language dramatic output and theatrical production in Quebec in the same period, with a particular emphasis on that produced in English and in Yiddish.

This course also offers the opportunity to conduct primary-source research and analysis on under-documented aspects of Quebec theatre. To this end, we will explore the holding of the McGill Archives and Special Collections as well as those at the National Theatre School. The archivist at the Jewish Public Library will engage us in a workshop on the history of Yiddish theatre in Montreal. We will hear from theatre artists working in Montreal today in the form of guest-lectures and interviews. Moreover, we will build a shared calendar of notable theatre performances in Montreal (in French, English, and Yiddish) for the 2018-19 season. From these, we will select two to see as a group, one of which will be the object of a short paper.  

Texts: Coursepack of critical and secondary readings

Plays will be selected to capitalize on the theatrical offerings in Montreal in Fall 2018. However, aignificant texts such as the following may feature on the reading list.

• Claude Gauvreau, The Charge of the Expormidable Moose (La charge de l’orignal épormyable)
• Jovette Marchessault, Night Cows
• Michel Tremblay, Les belles-sœurs  
• Collective, La nef des sorcières
• David Fennario – Balconville.
• Larry Tremblay, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi.
• Omari Newton, Sal Capone, The Lamentable Tragedy of
• Wajdi Mouawad, Scorched
• Evelyne de la Chenelière, Bashir Lazar
• Annabel Soutar, Seeds and/or Fredy

Evaluation: Participation; Posted class notes; Group research project; In-class author presentation; Short paper.

Format: Discussions, discussions, discussions; lectures, small, medium-sized, long; presentations / performances and other pedagogical means which can be arrived at through an exchange about possibilities.

Description: In this course we will focus only on the first half of Shakespeare’s career, the Elizabethan portion, which coincided with the rise of the professional theatre as the centerpiece of an emerging entertainment industry. We will begin with a number of very early plays, including The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Then we will focus on three plays – Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (world classics of history, tragedy, and comedy) – which he wrote all within the space of about a single year. The Merchant of Venice, and Henry IV, part one round out the decade of the 1590s, and our course. The plan is to cover approximately one play per week. Are you Shakespearienced? After this course you will be. The pace will be fast and unrelenting, with a view to giving students in the English major and minor programs a fuller appreciation of the scope of Shakespeare’s accomplishment in the first half of his career.

Texts: The Norton Shakespeare Volume I: Early Plays and Poems. 2nd edition. ISBN 978-0-393-93144-0. Available at The Word Bookstore on Milton Street.

Evaluation: midterm exam (30%); final essay (30%); final exam (30%); conference participation (10%)

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university courses in English literature, especially ENGL 202; some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture is desirable.

Description: A study of the poetry and selected prose of one of England’s most important, influential, and still controversial writers. While to many people today Milton seems the epitome of literary and political orthodoxy, in his own time he was known as a radical thinker, an advocate of regicide and divorce. His writing is complex and challenging, demanding close and active engagement from his readers. In this course we will take up his challenge to see especially how he speaks to current concerns. In the first few weeks, we look at Milton’s early poetry and some of his political writings, tracing his development as a poet in relation to his social, political, and literary context. The centre of the course will focus on a close reading of Paradise Lost. In conclusion, we will look briefly at his last works, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, and discuss Milton’s later reputation and his continuing role in the Western literary tradition.

Texts: (required texts are available at McGill Bookstore)

Stella Revard ed, John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
Barbara Lewalski, ed. John Milton: Paradise Lost (Blackwell, 2007).
Selections from the prose: on MyCourses
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (recommended)
King James Bible (recommended)

Evaluation: 25% mid-term; 40% term paper on Paradise Lost; 25% take-home exam; 10% class participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion

Note: Limited to students in English programs.

Description: This course will survey the emergence of theories and methodologies in philosophy and scholarship, especially in literary criticism, both from ancient intellectual models and in modern thought since the seventeenth century. As a basis for understanding and evaluating the role of “philosophical approaches” in literary and cultural studies, we will compare and contrast several kinds of critical thinking with the distinctive claims of philosophical formalism articulated influentially by Immanuel Kant. The Kantian legacy – not only its principles of moral and aesthetic autonomy and disinterestedness but also its emphasis on the conditions of knowledge and criteria of judgment – provides a powerful and continuing alternative to the nineteenth-century revival of dialectical thinking in Hegel, hermeneutics, and Marx. Our readings will reflect the far-reaching impact of the ideological opposition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism as exemplified by Kant and Hegel. We will examine the history of this opposition as a pattern of methodological assumptions and institutional practices. We will also review the claim that one literary genre in particular – the novel – embodies or expresses the characteristic philosophical problems of modernity.

Texts: Most of the books for this course will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). The following texts will be among those required (please note that Pluhar's translation of Kant is the only acceptable edition!):

• Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory Since Plato, third edition (Thomas Wadsworth)
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett)
• Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (MIT)
• Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (University of Chicago)

Evaluation: Papers (80%), test (10%), participation (10%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies).

Format: Lectures

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work in American Literature, preferably before 1900; or previous study in British Literature before 1900; or permission of instructor.

Description: A mid-level survey of later-19^th-century prose fiction forms representing a wide range of literary movements and modes. The course will be organized to trace ever-widening geographical, literary, and cultural horizons. A first unit will explore “regionalist” or “local color” writings (by authors such as Harris, Harte, Twain, Chopin, Stowe, Jewett, Cable, Chestnutt, and Alcott) rooted in the specificity of a unique geographical place that is seen to define a unique cultural or psychological identity. The second course unit will survey classic writerly responses to the late-19^th-century city—seen (in authors such as Crane, Dreiser, James, and Wharton) as a new sort of hybrid place in which diverse strangers from a variety of homes and backgrounds are brought together to work out forms of coexistence. The final unit will then follow another group of turn-of-the-century writers as they expand American horizons even further, reflecting the nation’s move into the international arena with new fictional treatments of the International Theme. Authors such as James and Wharton ground their writing in the ever-shifting experience of cross-cultural travel and meditate anxiously on the situation of the writer as “cosmopolite”--perfectly placed (or dis-placed) to explore the problems and possibilities of inter-national interchange in a modern, globalizing world.

Texts (Tentative; editions TBA):  To be selected from authors noted in description above, and from works tentatively listed below. Readings will include not only short stories but also several longer novels; the amount of assigned reading will be fairly intensive. Editions TBA.

• Coursepack of photocopied short stories.
• Alcott, Little Women;
• Dreiser, Sister Carrie;
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence; 
• James, The Portrait of a Lady;
• Baym, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature (9^th ed., Vol. C).

Evaluation (Tentative): 25% mid-term exam; 25% essay; 10% conference participation; 40% formal, 3-hour final exam. (NB: All forms of evaluation in this course—on exams as well as essays—test abilities in literary-critical writing and analysis; there will be no short-answer or multiple-choice exams graded by computer.)

Format: Lecture and discussion

Expected student preparation: No formal pre-requisite, but students will be expected to have the skills of close reading and command of critical terms developed in ENGL 311 (Poetics).  ENGL 228 (Introduction to Canadian Literature 1) provides appropriate background knowledge for this course

Description: A survey of the emergence and development of Canadian prose fiction in English from the later nineteenth century to the centennial of Confeder­ation in 1967.  We will seek to grasp the developing poetics and shifting generic boundaries of the Canadian novel to 1967, including works of political romance, prairie pastoral, modern prairie and urban realism, and experi­mental modernism.  A substantial portion of our studies will involve the situation of Canadian fiction within the context of the novel’s international development from realism to modernism.

Texts: TBA, including 6-8 of the following:

• Richardson, Wacousta (1832)
• Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (1852)
• DeMille, Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888)
• Duncan, The Imperialist (1904)
• Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)
• Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
• Ostenso, Wild Geese (1925)
• Knister, White Narcissus (1929)
• Grove, Fruits of the Earth (1933)
• ---.  Settlers of the Marsh (1925)
• Callaghan, They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935)
• Ross, As For Me and My House (1941)
• MacLennan, Two Solitudes (1945)
• ---.  The Watch that Ends the Night (1956)
• Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945)
• Klein, The Second Scroll (1951)
• Buckler, The Mountain and the Valley (1952)
• Wilson, The Equations of Love (1952)
• Watson, The Double Hook (1959)
• Laurence, The Stone Angel (1964)
• Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)

Evaluation: 

1.  An essay of 10-12 pages, from a choice of assigned topics (50%)
2.  A formal final examination, involving both short-answer and essay questions (40%)
3.  Partici­pation in class discussions, 10%.  Please note before choosing this course: I assess active participation in discussion, not attendance.  Full attendance throughout the semester without speaking will earn 0/10 in this category and will substantially affect your final grade.

Please note regarding this evaluation:

There is only one essay in this course.  It is longer than most essays assigned at the 300-level, and it weighs more heavily in your final grade than most such assign­ments.  Please consider these issues carefully in making your final course choices.

To help you succeed with such an essay, I encourage you to submit the following voluntary preparatory materials throughout the semester.  You may submit one, two, or all three (the first is particularly strongly recommended for anyone new to my courses and my high marking standards).  Each task below that you choose to complete will reduce the total weight assigned to the essay itself by 5%:

• a two-page close reading of a poem by a poet on the reading list you think you might like to discuss in your essay, to be submitted no later than January 30^th.  You may alter your choice of poet and topic after completing this task.
• a sentence outline of your argument, breaking the paper down into at least three major sections, each of which is to be broken down at least one further level (see your Canadian Writer’s Handbook for information about sentence outlines).  You may not alter your choice of poet and topic after completing this task.
• a draft of your paper’s opening paragraph, in which you identify and detail your topic and state your paper’s thesis.  You may not alter your choice of poet and topic after completing this task.

Thus if you complete all three of these voluntary tasks your essay will be worth 35% of your total mark.  Note however that if your mark on any of these assignments is lower than the mark you receive for the completed essay itself, the higher mark on the essay will stand.  Thus the essay’s weight of 50% will only be lowered by preliminary assignments that improve on the grade you receive on the essay itself.  This is clearly to your advantage.

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description: This course uses five wide-ranging British novels to study a foundational relationship in nineteenth-century fiction: the romantic relationship as a synecdoche of social organization.  Perhaps more precisely, the relationships we will analyze in the course novels reveal anxieties and realities of social disorganization – with broken engagements, and failed or fractured marriages operating as signs of the century’s disruptive transformations in class structure and geopolitical identity.   With this topic in mind, we will better understand how the dominantly private settings in the nineteenth-century British novel and intimate plots yield commentary on industrial, economic, and political change.  

Texts: 

• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility 1811
• Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist 1838
• Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 1848
• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 1859
• Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady 1875
• 329 Course pack

Evaluation: 

• Participation: 20% (includes reading quizzes)
• Close reading assignments: 30%
• Midterm essay: 25%
• Final exam (in class): 25% 

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description: The primary goal of this course is to acquaint students with English masterpieces from the second half of the 19th Century and a German bildungsroman influential at this time. While keenly engaged with the spirit of ‘progress’ and ‘reform’ sweeping through their continent, writers in this period tended to set the action of their novels a few decades back from their time of composition and publication. Keeping this historical perspective in mind, we will focus on how our novelists portray characters who struggle to find love and meaningful employment in an increasingly secular society still hedged in, however, by barriers of class, gender and religious affiliation. 

Texts:

• ​The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• David Copperfield  by Charles Dickens
• Villette by Charlotte Brontë
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion

Description: This seminar analyzes a range of English writings from the later Romantic period to provide insight into a number of major literary developments across the prose fiction, poetry, and critical prose of the second generation Romantics. This particular syllabus allows us to explore literatures of revolution and utopia, innovations in feminist poetics and theory, the rise of domestic and gothic fiction, new emphases on satire and free indirect discourse, the appearance of the Romantic lyric and the closet drama, aspects of Romantic love, sensibility, and incest, the emergence of cosmopolitanism and tourism, developments in literary and aesthetic theory, and poetic flights of fancy and imagination.

Our syllabus neither follows a strict chronological nor historical narrative. Instead, we will look at several related clusters of development within Romantic writing during the Regency period. As a result of this survey’s emphasis on important constellations of early nineteenth-century literature and culture, certain formal and historical topics will recur throughout the syllabus: representations of war, revolution, and imperial conflict; attempts to define genius and the solitary self; depictions of emotional and sexual intimacy; vacillations between idealism, irony, and skepticism; critiques of science, technology, and industry; representations of the child, the original, and the juvenile; haunting invocations of the dead, the dying, and the elegiac; engagements of ecological and nonhuman rhythms; and anachronistic returns to the medieval, the classics, and the gothic. 

Texts: Selected works by Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walter Scott, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.), Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and John Clare

Evaluation: 
10% participation
20% first paper
30% exam
40% second paper

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This is a course about really reading poetry, in this case, Canadian poetry. It focuses on a group of approximately ten Canadian poets who have formed and responded to the Canadian literary landscape since World War II. Most of the poets covered in the course are writers who confront modern and contemporary ideas about the nature of self, society, sexuality, gender, and art, but we also look at the ways in which these writers are trying to deal with the existential implications of new views about science, God, and the poet’s place in his or her rapidly changing world. Since part of the reading involves thinking about aesthetic and theoretical issues, the course will deal with these issues, just as it will pay close attention to the meaning and resonance of particular poems. At the same time, it will consider the ways in which these poets (and us, as readers) construct the place called Canada as a metaphor that’s central to our daily lives. Students are encouraged to explore multi-media material related to each poet in question. The writing component of the course (frequent short essays but no term papers or exams) is designed to improve interpretive abilities and to encourage creative forms of critical expression. Students enrolling in this course should be prepared to write short essays on a weekly basis, and to participate actively in class discussion.

Texts: Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto: Thomson Nelson, 2007.

Evaluation (Tentative): a series of short essays on each of the poets studied in the course, 80%; attendance, 10%; participation, 10%.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Prerequisites: Students should have 2 or 3 prior university courses in literature 

Description: This course will focus on British novels written after the Second World War and before the end of the century. This survey of novels will focus on class, the Welfare State, responses to the war, housing, conceptions of the future, the status of children and refugees, evil, women, gender, the decline of imperialism, Thatcherism, and fictional technique. Generic conventions of comedy and tragedy as they get mixed with novelistic representation will inform some lectures. The turn to history in the 1970s and 1980s will also be addressed.

Texts: 

Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

Evaluation: paper 30%: second paper 30%; attendance and participation: 10%; final exam 30%

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: In this course, we ask, is Shakespeare modern? Is he a precursor of the political culture of modernity? Is he the author of our ideas about what it is to be a happy and fulfilled person? And what, after all, do we mean when we say the word “modern”? We address these questions by thinking about our own ideas and practices, by reading plays by other early modern playwrights, some other works from the period and a few key readings in political philosophy. But the focus of our attention is a selection of plays by Shakespeare himself.

We also will spend time developing effective written and oral presentation skills—how to gather, organize, and analyze evidence, how to develop an idea/argument, how to engage and persuade your readers or auditors.

Texts:

Taming of the Shrew, ed. Frances E. Dolan (Bedford / St. Martin’s)
The Roaring Girl and other City Comedies, ed. James Knowles (Oxford)
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. Sylvan Barnett (Signet Classics)
Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford)
Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay Halio (Oxford)
King Lear, ed. Russell Fraser (Signet)
Other readings will be provided in electronic form. 

Evaluation:

Short essays (2 pages, 650 words approx.), 5 x 8% each 40%
I’ll count the best four of five, provided that you write all five.
Presentation (3 minutes) 15%
Participation 15%
Take-home Exam (on King Lear) 30%

Format: lecture, workshop, discussion.

Prerequisites: none

Description: The material forms and circumstances of texts fundamentally affect their meaning. This premise underlies the history of the book, a field of theory and historical scholarship aimed at understanding the circulation of ideas in connection with technology, sociology, and economics. If the book is not only a vessel of ideas but also a thing of industrial manufacture that is marketed and consumed, then knowledge of the book industry and of the forces that influence it becomes important to literary and historical interpretation. In this course we will survey defining contributions to bibliography and book history, reading works of literature in light of new studies on the socioeconomic factors behind their creativity and reputation. Topics will include analytical bibliography, scholarly editing, books before print, copyright, and the cultural history of authorship, publishing, and reading. Emphasis will be placed on the history of the book in Canada. Students will become familiar with defining contributions to the field, learn how to analyze the physical form of books, review a critical essay, and study the transmission of a work of Canadian literature.

Texts: tentative list

• Michelle Levy & Tom Mole, ed., The Broadview Reader in Book History (Broadview, 2015) ISBN 978-1-55481-088-8
• Allan Greer, ed., The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Bedford, 2000) ISBN 978-0312167073 $22.32
• Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, ed. Carl Ballstadt, Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1988 / distributed by McGill-Queen’s UP), ISBN 9780886290450

Evaluation:

Bibliography Assignment (20%)
Response (30%)
Essay (40%)
Participation (10%)

Format: Lecture and Discussion 

Prerequisite:  No formal prerequisite, but previous or concurrent university-level work in literary studies and a familiarity with the basics of literary analysis are expected for this 300-level class.

Description: This course examines several major works of European literature that significantly influenced Western conceptions of literate practice, authorship, religion, and the place of the individual human in society and in the universe. Course texts include examples of literature (in translation) spanning from Late Antiquity to the Italian Renaissance. As such, ENGL 348 is suitable for those looking to fulfill curricular requirements in the medieval era.

The course has two main objectives: to introduce students to early literature as an object of study in its own right; and to explore this literature as an important background for the study of subsequent Western literature and culture, including in England. This will involve substantial reading, but the focus will be on key moments from the texts, allowing English students to come away with a solid working knowledge of the texts and their influence. We will emphasize themes of continuity across the periods we call “Late Antiquity”, “the Middle Ages” and “the Renaissance” while still recognizing the differences between our own historical perspectives and those of the writers. The course will consider the following topics in particular: language and signification; autobiography and conversion; and sacred and secular. All course texts were written on the European continent and will be read in modern English translation.

Texts: All of the following required works will be available from The Word bookstore.

Augustine, Confessions (Oxford World’s Classics ed) [ISBN: 0199537828]
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin ed) [ISBN: 0140447806]
Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (Penguin ed) [ISBN: 0140445218]
Dante, The Portable Dante (Penguin ed) [ISBN: 0142437549]
Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France (Penguin ed) [ISBN: 0140447598]
Petrarch, Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works (Oxford World’s Classics ed) [ISBN: 0199540691]

Evaluation: Take-home Midterm Exam: 25%; Take-home Final Exam: 35%; Final Essay: 30% (7-8 pages; may be composed of two shorter essays); Participation and attendance: 10%

Format: Lectures

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussions

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in the Drama and Theatre stream who have completed ENGL 230: Introduction to Theatre Studies. It is to be taken in the Winter term of U1 or in the first Winter term after the student’s selection of the Drama and Theatre major or minor program. For Drama and Theatre majors, this is a required course. 

Description: This course has three interrelated goals. First, it introduces students to the formal and stylistic elements of drama, theatre, and performance. How do drama (as a work of imaginative literature) and theatre (as a live, time-based performance) communicate to readers and audiences? By what technical, stylistic, and affective means do they make meaning? Second, the course offers instruction in a range of critical approaches to interpreting and analysing dramatic texts and live performance – that is, both text-based and image-based works of theatre. Finally, the Poetics of Performance explores issues and debates that have structured theatre and performance practice and scholarship from Aristotle’s Poetics to the “new dramaturgy” of post-dramatic theatre.

Students must come to class prepared with all of the assigned reading and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis. By collectively interpreting samples plays and performances in class, and in debating the readings of each unit, we will build a concrete, shared, discipline-specific vocabulary and sets of analytical practices for the interpretation of the dramatic text and the theatrical event. In this way, this required course for Drama and Theatre majors, prepares Drama and Theatre students for all other courses in the stream. 

Texts: a course-pack of readings in dramatic and performance theory including texts in aesthetics, staging, reception, semiotics, phenomenology, narratology, dramaturgy, reading the body, structuralism and post-structuralism, and more.

Recommended texts: Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998; Paul Alain and Jen Harvie, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. New York: Routledge, 2006

Evaluation: In-class participation; short, critical interpretation papers; group project; final take-home exam.

Format: Lectures, group discussions, in-class close-reading and analytical exercises.

Description: The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories that range from cutting religious and cultural satire – featuring the best sex jokes and toilet humour of the Middle Ages – to sincere pious reflection. The work functions both to instruct and amuse, to unsettle and reaffirm, to provoke and console. The genres of the tales are similarly various, including courtly romance, comic fabliau, saint’s life, and beast fable. More than eighty-two manuscripts of Chaucer’s tales survive, making his series of pilgrims’ tales one of the most popular works of the period. Unfinished at the time of Chaucer’s death, The Canterbury Tales has developed a vibrant afterlife, spurring numerous translations, additions, and adaptations. This course is devoted to a close reading of Chaucer’s experimental masterpiece. We will situate The Canterbury Tales in the turmoil and unrest of late fourteenth-century England, examining how Chaucer responds to pressing contemporary debates about the English language, threat of religious dissent, emergence of a merchant class, and social position of women. By looking at sources and analogues of the tales, we will observe how Chaucer at once follows and departs from medieval literary conventions and positions himself in the literary canon of Europe. The course will pay special attention to late-medieval manuscript production and circulation. Chaucer’s works began as hand-written documents that had to be copied by his scribes in order for them to be circulated to his original audience. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and analyse the major themes of Chaucer’s seminal work against the backdrop of medieval manuscript culture.

We will read Chaucer in the original Middle English, though no previous experience with Middle English or medieval literature is required. Instruction in Middle English will be provided.

Texts: Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. 2nd edn. Ed. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005. ISBN 978-0-393-92587-6. [Students are required to use this edition]
* Text is available at the Word Bookstore (469 Rue Milton).

Evaluation: Participation 10%; Close reading exercises 5 x 3% (15% total); Midterm test 15%; Essay 35%; Take-home exam 25%.

Format: Lectures, class discussions.

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA 

Format: Seminar

Description: This course explores several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and critical theory such as (but not limited to): interpretation; culture; ideology; hegemony; class, race, and gender; signification; discourse; postcolonialism; postmodernism. While we engage with these complex and contested issues of interpretation and criticism, we will read key texts from a range of critical schools and practices, including Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Marxism. We will also read selections from, among others, the writings of Matthew Arnold, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Judith Butler, and Edward Said. These texts will help us articulate and interrogate some of the most fundamental questions pertaining to the practice of literary studies: What constitutes literature? Who determines what texts mean, and how? How do texts relate to broader social structures? Considering these questions and texts will necessitate careful and patient reading as well as sustained engagement with lecture and discussion during class. Some of the readings for this course will be difficult and dense. Thorough preparation for each class meeting is essential. The course is required for – but not restricted to – honours students in the English department’s Literature stream.

Texts: 

• Terry Eagleton – Literary Theory: An Introduction
• Selections from the texts by critics and theorists 

Evaluation: TBD

Format: lectures and discussions

Prerequisite:  None. Permission of the instructor required for registration. 

Description: Costuming I focuses on skills acquisition. The focus is on industrial sewing machine use, and hand sewing techniques. Both beginners and more advanced students will have equal opportunity to gain skills. We will practice the skills needed to make costumes with a small practical project. This will provide an opportunity to become comfortable with industrial machinery, while gaining skills and confidence needed for fittings.

Character analysis and research inform our design choices.   The director will provide students with an initial directorial concept and vision for the show, emphasizing clear character delineation. Our design discussion will focus on color palette, mood and the individual characters. Later, the director will assess the students’ inspiration images, and decide which images will carry forward into the production design. The design for the production will be chosen using the students’ inspirational images.  Each student will make a costume or costume element based on the production design.

Texts: the play script will be supplied on mycourses

Required tools: Sewing kit: thimble, fabric scissors, stitch ripper, one package of needles, one box of dressmaking pins, a pencil and small notepad.
Optional additions: measuring tape, pin cushion, metal pushpins, tracing wheel, tailoring wax, needle nosed pliers, and a small sharp pair of fabric scissors.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lectures, hands on projects, demonstrations, and practical work.  Additional production hours outside of class time are required, and are often substantial.  Expect a minimum of 9 hours per week.  There is no maximum.

Average enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the instructor. Selection process is by interview with the instructor.

Prerequisite: None

Description: Divided into a range of concerns and subgenres (the question of sound, the slasher film, the gothic) that ultimately converge on the problem of vulnerable bodies in space, this course will introduce students to the versatility of horror and pose the question of its ongoing adaptability. Central to our approach will be the complication of affect. In other words, no longer will we be content to judge simply whether a horror film is “scary;” instead, we will explore the genre’s production of a broad palette of feeling, including key cousins of fear such as disgust, humour, and shame. Indeed, even fear itself might be usefully divided into slow dread and fast panic (which is one reason why the speed of zombies matters). It is ultimately this rich interplay of response that will help us articulate the genre’s corresponding socio-political work, including its special importance for feminism and queer theory. Possible films include Halloween, Suspiria, Freaks, Babadook, and Get Out.

Texts: coursepack

Evaluation: two short assignments 25%; posted class notes 5%; term project 40%; participation 10%; quizzes 20%

Format: lecture/discussions and weekly conferences

Avg. enrollment: 65 students

Description: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Expected student preparation: Previous university courses in Drama and Theatre, Literature, or Cultural Studies.

Description: This course explores the changing theatrical landscape in Britain from the Restoration to the mid-nineteenth century (1660-1843). Organized around key legislation pertaining to the theatre of the period, the course will provide an overview of dramatic forms and theatrical practice from the reopening of the professional theatres to the rise of melodrama. We will examine representative theatrical figures and dramatic works, treating the plays as performance events rather than literary documents. In addition, we will work with such historical source material as reviews and excerpts from contemporary acting handbooks to consider how both performers and audience members reacted to the changing forms of theatrical representation.

Texts: (tentative): Peter Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); coursepack containing source material and the following plays: Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677); George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer (1706); John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728); David Garrick, The Country Girl (1766); Hannah Cowley, The Belle’s Stratagem (1780); Joanna Baillie, De Monfort (1800); Douglas Jerrold, The Rent Day (1832).

Format: lecture, discussion, practical work

Evaluation: (tentative): participation 10%; practical assignment 15%; short writing assignment 15%; midterm 20%; final research essay 40%.

Description: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Prerequisite: None. Permission of the instructor required for registration.

Description: This semester, emphasis is on building sewing skills and costume construction techniques. There are two main learning modules in advanced costuming: Technical Skill Development, and Draping. Sewing skills that were gained in the first semester will be built upon through specific practical exercises in a skill building project. Draping techniques will be practiced on half-scale mannequins, and will culminate in a themed project. The focus of the semester’s work is on costuming the English Department Mainstage production.

The costume class will see the production through from inception to closing night. We begin with the text, and create charts as a medium for script analysis. Next, the characters are translated into image form, through the Inspirational Images project. The costume design springs from the Image project, and each student will create a costume based on their own design. The hands-on process of making the costume is the Production Project. Costuming II differs from Costuming I in the level of independence expected from the students. The various aspects of production will take a substantial amount of time throughout the semester. Students who are unprepared for the time commitment are asked to reconsider accepting a place in the class.

Each student will also have a specific Production Duty that takes shape during the semester, and culminates at the end of term as the production is presented.

Students take an active part in defining and outlining their specific production duties by formulating a contract with milestone dates and deadlines, in collaboration with their classmates and instructor.  This will give students an opportunity to manage all aspects of their production duties independently. Students are expected to refer back to their contract throughout the semester in order to maintain the schedule that they formulated. 

Texts: the play script will be supplied on mycourses

Required tools: Sewing kit: thimble, fabric scissors, stitch ripper, one package of needles, one box of dressmaking pins, a pencil and small notepad.
Optional additions: measuring tape, pin cushion, metal pushpins, tracing wheel, tailoring wax, needle nosed pliers, and a small sharp pair of fabric scissors.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lectures, hands on projects, demonstrations, and practical work.  Additional production hours outside of class time are required, and are often substantial.  Expect a minimum of 9 hours per week.  There is no maximum.

Average enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the instructor.

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures, discussion, screening and field trips.

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with concepts and terminology from film studies and cultural studies will be very useful.

Description: First emerging as one of the key filmmakers of what B. Ruby Rich called the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s, Todd Haynes has produced a body of work that interrogates gender, sexuality, illness, stardom, and the notion of authorship itself. We will explore Haynes’s films through the category of pastiche, as his films critically appropriate the visual and narrative tropes of various cinematic genres and modes (from melodrama to documentary) as part of their inquiry into the constructed nature of experience in postmodern life. But while Fredric Jameson has denounced the postmodern use of pastiche as apolitical “blank parody,” we will examine how Haynes’s films deploy their cinematic devices so as to de-familiarize and de-nature them, encouraging a mode of spectatorship that we might characterize, following Laura Mulvey, as “passionate detachment.” This course will survey Haynes’s oeuvre, from the famously banned Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story to his most recent film, 2017’s Wonderstruck. We will also screen a number of films and other media materials that his films rework and re-imagine, in order to examine critically the category of authorship, cinematic and otherwise.

Texts: 

The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows, ed. James Morrison
Course pack

Films:

• Longtime Companion (Norman Rene, 1989)
• Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)
• Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Todd Haynes, 1988)
• Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)
• Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998)
• All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)
• Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
• I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)
• Dottie Gets Spanked (Todd Haynes, 1993)
• Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes, 2011)
• Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)
• Wonderstruck (Todd Haynes, 2017)

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lecture, discussion, weekly screenings

Description: This course addresses the presence of mute characters in films and fiction. These characters – mute by virtue of deafness, a coma, trauma, or by apparent choice or inexplicable reason – don’t use vocal speech but communicate via sign language, the written text, embodied expression, their actions, and their silence. This last phenomenon – the one who doesn’t speak by volition or without underlying cause – is perhaps the most interesting. We have to ask what the silence performs and what it is the text can’t bring itself to say. We will focus on what the silence of the mute character amplifies, activates, propels, reveals, puts into motion, and represses. We will be in tune with the themes, motifs, metaphors that animate these texts. Among them are: music, the materiality of language, violence, death.

Language fails us: this could be the theme of this course. The focus is thus not on silence as a sign of repression or oppression but as a productive site which has the effect of amplifying voices, anxieties, and forces around it. That is to say, we will ask what interests are filled in to replace the silence of the mute. One could also say this is a course about cultural ventriloquism. We will of necessity discuss the fetishization of truth, identity and voice. The theoretical framework is drawn from some of the ideas of Michel Foucault on the productivity of power via silence; as well there are a few short readings on silence and voice which use some Foucauldian ideas.

Texts: ​

• Mister Sandman, Barbara Gowdy
• The Seal Wife, Kathryn Harrison
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer

Short story, chapters and article:

• Karen Russell, “Accident Brief,” The New Yorker (June 19, 2006)
• Chloe Taylor, “Confession and Modern Subjectivity,” The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal (Routledge, 2008)
• Michael Chion, “The Mute Character’s Final Words,” The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1999)
• Valerie Hazel, “Disjointed Articulations: The Politics of Voice and Jane Campion’s The Piano,” Women’s Studies Journal, 10:2 (September 1994)

Films:

• Persona  (dir. Ingmar Bergman)
• The Shape of Water (dir. Guillermo del Toro)
• The Piano (dir. Jane Campion)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir. Milos Forman)
• Johnny Belinda (dir. Jean Negulesco)
• Talk to Her (dir. Pedro Almodovar)

Evaluation: (tentative) 10% short essay on the short story; 70% two short essays (35% each); 10% participation; 10% short responses

Format: Lecture, discussion, screenings

Description: This course confronts a central modern ambiguity: to be fully human – i.e., social – is to be alone. We live among others and according to shared assumptions and norms and yet are capable of, and equipped for, self-contemplation, even self-absorption. This courses addresses the literary and cinematic/televisual manifestation of solitude in a short story, novels, films, non-fiction essays and a TV show. We will examine how it is imagined, elaborated and, if not exalted, presented as inescapable: the experience of being one in a world. Our characters negotiate “the self” in relation to, among others: their environments; geographic location; nature; their history; official history; their location or dislocation within culture; the central ambiguities of modern life; memories and official memory, or memory as solitude; others; their emotions, desires and fears; their intellect and intellectual apprehension; intuitive and authoritative knowledge; the family; narrative, “truth,” and, perhaps foremost, language itself. A central human paradox is that we have words to describe the indescribable. Solitude may be indescribable but it still seeks expression in language, metaphor and images. All our characters are marginal in some way or another and that means they foreground questions about what constitutes a center. Our works depict hope, longing, and creative imaginings of understanding and existing.

Texts: books –  (tentative)

Open City, Teju Cole
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
Doctor Glas, Hjalmar Söderberg
Funeral for a Dog, Thomas Pletzinger
Seeking Rapture, Kathryn Harrison

Films –

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)
Last Tango in Paris (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
Paris Texas (dir. Wim Wenders, 1984)
The Straight Story (dir. David Lynch, 1999)
In Treatment (HBO, 2010)

Short story, chapters & article and selection –

Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk”
Jonathan Franzen, “Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude”
Nina Nørgaard, “Pleasure and Pain – Solitude as a Literary Theme: A Review Article”
Edward Engelberg, “Introduction,” Solitude and Its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction
​Selections from Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession 

Evaluation: (tentative) 10% discussion paper (900 words); 40% first short essay (2000 words); 40% second short essay (2000 words); 10% participation

Format: lecture and discussion; screenings

Description: 

“I could see it was quality television, but I didn’t like it.”
-Viewer quoted in Sarah Cardwell, “Is Quality Television Any Good?”

What makes a program “quality” TV? Who decides? In this course, we will trace the evolution of television as a medium and technology through discourses surrounding its value, beginning with the “golden age” of early live television and concluding with contemporary “complex” TV. We will examine what factors—aesthetic, moral, and political—have been used to determine the “quality” of a television show at different moments in the medium’s history. What textual and aesthetic strategies are associated with quality? What are the commercial implications of this concept? Who makes, watches, and is depicted on quality TV? What kind of TV is not “quality”? We will examine the larger implications—in terms of gender, race, class, and nation—of these distinctions, and the limitations of quality TV as a designation.

By the end of the course, students will be able to discuss the ways “quality” TV has been defined historically, culturally, and industrially in the U.S. and Canada, and understand the difference between evaluative and analytic discourses (the difference between writing and discussing TV as a critic and as a scholar).

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: Participation (15%), midterm reading quiz (25%), short paper (25%), final paper or project (35%)

Format: Lecture with discussion, screenings

Prerequisites: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with concepts and terminology from film studies and cultural studies will be very useful.

Description: This course will engage in a more or less chronologically organized survey of the American teen film, understood as a genre that is not only about but also made for teenagers (although a few of our screenings will test this definition). We will begin in the 1950s, when “the teenager” as a sociological category (and target market) took on a new prominence in American cultural life, and the films about them developed more intentional strategies of addressing the teen audience. As we trace the genres development, we will explore how it functions as an arena in which anxieties about individual subject formation and the larger social order are played out. As Jon Lewis has argued, teen films are about the breakdown of “patriarchy, law and order, and institutions like the school, the church, and the family” even as they often conclude with “the eventual discovery of viable and often traditional forms of authority.” In other words, teen films depict stories of social control and resistance while also operating as their own form of interpellation. But we will also investigate the ways in which the films provide textual resources for their young audiences that do not necessarily line up with dominant forms of power. In short, this course will examine the complex cultural work that the teen film performs.

Required Films: These will likely include many of the following titles:

Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955)
Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
Beach Blanket Bingo (William Asher, 1965)
American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)
Cooley High (Michael Schultz, 1975)
Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan, 1979)
Little Darlings (Ronald F. Maxwell, 1980)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)
The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983)
The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)
River’s Edge (Tim Hunter, 1986)
Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988)
Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)
Totally F***ed Up (Gregg Araki, 1993)
Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995)
Kids (Larry Clark, 1995)
Thirteen (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003)
Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lecture and discussion; screenings

Description: In this course, we study key literary works that have been central to the creation of our ideas about the private and the public. These include two plays by Shakespeare, readings from the two influential “confessions” of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great nineteenth-century novel Jane Eyre, and Katherine Boo’s brilliant novel-like account of life in the “undercity.” Our literary reading will be supplemented by the work of a number of important thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Warner, and Martha Nussbaum.

The course is about the history of the ideas and practices that have created the shifting zones of private and public life. We’ll move toward a deeper understanding of how our world has been shaped by the history of privacy and publicity (i.e., the condition of being public). We will also work on critical writing skills—how to select evidence from a literary or philosophical text, how to analyze that evidence creatively and critically, how to build on evidence, and how to develop a coherent, persuasive, and moving argument. Students in the course will write four one-page argumentative, evidence-based essays. Students will also write two four-page essays—more reflective but still evidence-based and argumentative. The take-home exam will focus on privacy, publicity, and the question of justice.

Participation counts a lot in the course. That means being there and it also means bringing your ideas and questions to class. It is really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question. Questions of all kinds will drive the intellectual work of the course forward.

Texts: (available at Paragraph Books):

Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (Pelican)
Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford)
St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford)
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford)
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forever: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House, 2012)
Other readings will be provided in electronic form.

Evaluation: 

One-page papers                                                         20%
I will calculate this grade based on the best three out of four one-page papers—provided that you write all four papers.
Four-page papers                                                        40%
Participation                                                                15%
Take-home Exam                                                        25%

Format: lecture and discussion

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

Format: lecture and discussion

Expected Preparation: Previous and / or coterminous university courses in film, literary, cultural, theatre, drama, and performance studies. Or by permission of the Professor. 

Description: This course will combine the reading of plays, essays, articles and chapters with the creation of an original play / staged performance put on by groups of students working in Ateliers. The essays and articles will come from two anthologies edited by Julie Salverson and from online journals. Authors will include Salverson, Sherene H. Razack, Honor-Ford Smith, Catherine Graham, Ingrid Mündel, Jennifer H. Capraru, Jan Selman, Alan Filewod, Savannah Walling, Denis Salter, Nandi Bhatia, Aparna Dharwadker, and Edward Little. The plays will include Eight Men Speak by Oscar Ryan et al, Waiting For Lefty by Clifford Odets, The Monument by Colleen Wagner, Bhopal by Rahul Varma, and Palace Of The End by Judith Thompson.  All of these readings will be contextualized in relationship to the work of various theatre companies, together with an examination of a range of historical, political, community, social, racial, ideological, and gendered subject-positions and the kinds of theatre that they have enabled, now enable, and will continue to enable.

The course is unusual in the (intense) degree to which it will engage with close readings of texts along with the creation of original plays / performances.

As with any performance-based course, especially one that is based on the principles and practices of collective creation (to choose but one term for this way of working) all students will need to make an unconditional, disciplined, highly focused, and co-operative engagement with the work of conceptualizing, developing, researching, writing, rehearsal, and performance of their (new) play, always practising the discourse of “respectful dialogue.” Similarly, the close readings, by various interpretative means, of the plays, essays, and articles will be demanding. All activities will be time-consuming.

There are four “mantras” that I shall be urging you to practise to guide you and your ensemble on what will indeed become a journey:

• Teesri Duniya Theatre’s motto: “Change the world, one play at a time.”
• Some sage words often ascribed to Hippocrates, though the attribution is in doubt: “Do no harm.”
• Two pithy statements by Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win”; and “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

Participation counts a lot in the course. That means being there and it also means bringing your ideas and questions to class. It is really true: there is no such thing as a stupid question. Questions of all kinds will drive the intellectual work of the course forward.

Texts: 

Salverson, Julie. Ed Community Engaged Theatre and  Performance. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2011.
---. Ed. Popular Political Theatre and Performance. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2010.
Filewod, Alan. Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2011.
Ryan, Oscar et al. Eight Men Speak: A Play by Oscar Ryan et al.  Ed. Alan Filewod.  Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2013.
Odets, Clifford. Waiting for Lefty. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc. [1935], 1962.
Wagner, Colleen. The Monument. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 1996.
Varma, Rahul. Bhopal. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2004.
Thompson, Judith. Palace of the End. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2007.
Diamond, David. Theatre for Living. Foreword by Fritjof Capra. Victoria: Trafford Publishing, 2007.

There are also two online articles by Julie Salverson to read:
“Change on Whose Terms? Testimony and an Erotics of Inquiry,” Theater 31.3 (Fall 2001):  [118]-125.
“Performing Emergency: Witnessing, Popular Theatre, and the Lie of the Literal,” Theatre Topics 6.2 (1996): 181-191.

Instructive articles in relation to Rahul Varma, Bhopal, and Teesri Duniya Theatre include:
Bhatia, Nandi, “Diasporic Activism and the Mediations of ‘Home’: South Asian Voices in Canadian Drama,” Studies in Social Justice 7.1 (2013): 125-41. (Open Source.) http://goo.gl/WRkwm0
​Dharwadker, Aparna. “Diaspora and the Theatre of the Nation” Theatre Research International 28.3 (October 2003): 303-325. The section on Teesri and Varma is on pp. 309-317. (e-journal)
Little. Edward. “Intercultural Mediation: Inter-, Intra-, and Crosscultural Approaches to Cultural Democracy.” In Culture pour tous. Actes du Colloque international sur la médiation culturelle. Montréal – Décembre 2008. 7 Pp. [un-numbered].

Open source: http://goo.gl/gQt7mf
Or use:
http://www.culturepourtous.ca/forum/2008/PDF/07_Little.pdf
This article by Professor Little is very instructive in relation to the contexts in which Teesri’s work, and that of similar activist theatre groups, has taken place. There is an excellent set of photos in colour.
Salter, Denis.  “Change the World, One Play at a Time: Teesri Duniya Theatre and the Aesthetics of Social Action: Denis Salter talks with Rahul Varma, Ted Little and Jazwant Guzder.” Canadian Theatre Review 125 (Winter 2006): [69]-74. (Print)

I shall be inviting Rahul Varma to visit our class.

Evaluation: The creation of the performance, the performance itself, the post-performance discussion and the rehearsal “diary”—to which everyone in a given Atelier will contribute--will be worth 60 %.  (The grade is for all members of a given Atelier.); A presentation on a play, essay, chapter, or article, along with an 8-page paper in the form of a distilled critical argument: 30%; Continuing and full participation in the intellectual and creative life of the seminar, adding substantially to discussions: 10%

Format: Lectures, discussions, presentations, out-loud readings, student-generated performances.